Conventional digital printers are designed for an office printer market. Using digital printers for volume/industrial printing is new. The volume/industrial printing market has different requirements than the office market. Some of the features required from an industrial printer include printing the same image repeatedly; printing an image at a high rate of speed; being able to incorporate elements in the print image that changes (i.e. a barcode or other quality control marks); being able to describe regions where no printing is to take place; high reliability; minimizing ink wastage; and maximizing overall productivity of the print production process.
How well these requirements are met affects commercial cost of operating the industrial printer to produce a finished product. This invention provides a device that can used in a printing system to satisfy these requirements and that will allow for the commercial development of a digital press.
Conventional printing presses typically use a mirror image impression of a required print out. This impression is combined with a printing fluid and is then xe2x80x9cpressed ontoxe2x80x9d a substrate to produce a desired printout. This process has the advantage of speed; presses can be created that produce printouts at a rate limited only by the mechanical operations required to physically press an impression onto a substrate.
To be of value in the volume/industrial printers marketplace a digital press has to offer print speeds that are comparable to those of conventional printing presses. One way a digital press can match the speed of a conventional printing press is to use many print heads in parallel.
This application discloses a control device that can be used in conjunction with any type of electronic printhead to create a printing system that is optimally fast and can be extended to support an unlimited number of printheads, thus allowing the device to print onto any size, shape or type of media and at speeds comparable to conventional presses that already exist in the marketplace.
One advantage that digital presses offer over conventional presses is that of digital control over the images being printed. This offers the operator flexibility to manage the image in a number of beneficial ways. The image may be modified digitally between each print out. This allows the operator to customize each printout with specific information, such as quality control marks. With conventional presses this facility can only be achieved by providing additional printing stages to the printing process. This adds to cost and production times.
A second advantage that digital presses offer over conventional presses is that setup and changeover time is reduced. When using a conventional press, the image impression has to be created and placed upon the printing press. The creation time for an impression may be several days or weeks. Once the impression has been created the time required to remove the previous impression from a press and replace it with the new impression is many minutes and can be more than an hour. The economics of printing operations using conventional presses is that it is usually uneconomic to do print runs of less than 5,000 items. With a digital press, no physical impressions are used. This reduces the image creation cost and removes the overhead of setting up a press. As a result print runs of one item are economic, this is beneficial as it reduces printing costs, it reduces lead times required to set up a print run, and it reduces waste.
Still other benefits and advantages will become apparent to one skilled in the art upon reading and understanding the following detailed description.